


let's take off our disguise

by choomchoom



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: ("bittersweet" may be a little generous), Bittersweet Ending, Cross-faction relationship, Enemies to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, mutual rescuing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-02-22 22:07:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23134450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choomchoom/pseuds/choomchoom
Summary: To escape Decepticon custody, Hot Rod steals Deadlock's ship. He accidentally also steals Deadlock.(Guess how many beds the ship has. Go on, guess.)
Relationships: Drift | Deadlock/Hot Rod
Comments: 26
Kudos: 135





	let's take off our disguise

**Author's Note:**

> A million billion thanks to Mars for beta-reading and encouragement! This fic is so much better for your edits, thank you! 
> 
> I actually wrote the first draft of this last year and didn't certainly intend for the "isolated together" piece to be as timely as it is. Hope you enjoy!
> 
> Some additional warnings: medical procedure that looks kind of like self-injury, some anxiety over food/rationing. Please let me know if you need details.

So far, the posting on Iterion had been mind-numbingly, gut-wrenchingly, all-consumingly boring. Hot Rod’s first thought at being jolted awake by alarm klaxons in the middle of the night was _finally!_

He leapt out of his berth and transformed as soon as he was in the hallway, speeding all the way to his duty station near the reinforced main entrance to the base. The outpost was sparsely manned, which was great for racing through the hallways, but probably bad if there was, you know, an actual threat that had prompted the alarms to go off.

“What’ve we got?” Hot Rod asked as he transformed back to root in the doorway to the security room, using his remaining momentum from the drive to complete his transformation in midair and then grabbing onto the sides of the doorway to keep himself from falling flat on his face. Ironhide gave him that look that said he wanted to give Hot Rod another lecture about breaking the speed limit on base.

“Decepticons,” Ironhide said instead, motioning Hot Rod inside and pointing to the radar screen.

Hot Rod took in the image on the radar, all thoughts of a speed-related lecture forgotten. There was one spacecraft carrier surrounded by gunships, moving all too rapidly in their direction. “Lots of Decepticons.”

“We can’t defend this place for long,” Ironhide said. “Not long enough. Not against an assault of this size. Our only chance is to go underground and hope that they think we’ve fled.”

“And put the Iterions at risk?” Sunstreaker asked.

“No. We’re abandoning the fortress, and we’ll demolish the entrance to the tunnel when we do. The ships aren’t close enough to read lifesigns yet – hopefully they’ll think the place was abandoned a long time ago.”

It wasn’t a very good plan. Hot Rod knew that, and he suspected that everyone else in the room knew too. But he couldn’t think of a better one, and this plan had the obvious advantage of - “Demolish?”

“Are you volunteering? Everyone on the base except us in this room is already evacuating to the tunnels. We only need one person to stay behind and set the charges.”

“Say no more,” Hot Rod said, grinning through the natural sting of trepidation. “That’s my jam. Show me the pattern one more time?” They’d practiced this as an egress drill, but they hadn’t expected the attackers to be Decepticons when they’d been doing it. They’d expected to have more time as the Iterions’ enemies – the Concedrex – besieged the fortress with their “weapons,” which were hardly a threat to anyone, let alone Cybertronians.

Ironhide brought up the diagram and Hot Rod committed it to memory one more time. Easy enough – circles of explosives that would bring down the tunnel that led from the base to the underground city beneath it and make it look like nothing but a wobbly bit of the base’s foundation. Hot Rod would have to set the explosives to go off from the top side and then jump, which was exactly the kind of daring stunt he’d been missing. Once he was sure he had it, he pushed away from the table. “What are we waiting for? Let’s move.”

Five minutes later, the rest of his team was well underground and the walls were shaking with the first round of Decepticon bombs. Hot Rod pressed the timer and ran toward the tunnel –

\- and was thrown straight over it as the largest bomb yet shook the very struts of the building, ruining his approach in favor of making him smash painfully against the opposite wall of the basement room. He blinked his optics a few times to recalibrate them, and realized abruptly that he no longer had time to get down the tunnel. He dove for the door as the charges went off, and felt the heat of the explosion pushing him farther away before the concussive wave hit and he lost consciousness.

* * *

Hot Rod was on a berth in a medical bay in space. The berth part was easy enough to tell by feel – not the comfiest ever, but right around medibay standard. The sounds of medical equipment confirmed his location. And his limbs felt a little bit like they were floating, which theoretically could be from injuries or medication, but more likely came from relief from Iterion’s harsher than average gravity.

Hot Rod didn’t online his optics yet, trying to read the situation. The Autobots hadn’t had time to get any ships off the ground before the Decepticons had started bombing their base, and there weren’t any Autobots nearby who could have made it in time to help before the Decepticons took over the planet. The only logical explanation for being in space was if he was on a Decepticon ship.

But if he was on a Decepticon ship, there was no chance he’d have woken up in the medibay. Even if they’d bothered to treat his injuries, a Decepticon medic would have ensured that he didn’t wake up until he was in a prison cell.

When he did online his optics, it was in wariness and confusion.

Definitely a medibay. There was a monitor next to his head and a sterile surgery kit open on the table in front of it. The laser scalpel was on the table next to the rest of the kit, probably because it had been used to splice an energon drip into a line in Hot Rod’s arm.

There was a medic across the room, typing something into a computer terminal. Hot Rod felt his whole frame relax at seeing the Autobot badge on his plating.

“You’re awake,” the medic said, his voice neutral as he pushed back his chair to approach Hot Rod’s berth.

“What happened? Who are you?” Hot Rod tried to pull himself back from the approaching stranger, but his limbs weren’t responding.

“My name is Medicus. You’re on an Autobot ship that was part of a convoy that was rerouted to help you all on Iterion after we got word of the attack. The base is back under Autobot control, and we’ve been waiting for you to wake to help us proceed.”

They needed Hot Rod’s help? Hot Rod usually had to push and shove his way into doing anything interesting. “What do you need me for?”

“We found you in the rubble from the strikes the Decepticons managed to get in before we arrived,” Medicus said. “But the rest of the Autobots you were stationed with seem to have safely evacuated. We just need you to tell us the mass transport coordinates that they would have gone to in an emergency in order to inform them that we’ve retaken the base.”

Hot Rod had thought this guy’s story was rusty from the start, but he gave himself away completely in the last sentence. The Iterion base hadn’t even had a mass transporter, and Hot Rod could only hope that the Decepticons had bombed enough of the place before realizing that it was nearly empty to not find out that inconvenient fact. “The – coordinates, of course,” he said. “It’s – hm – uh –” He paused, pretending to think hard. Then he looked up at Medicus, his best attempt at bewilderment on his face. “I can’t remember. Why can’t I remember? What’s wrong with me?”

‘Medicus’ ( _that_ was the name this liar picked? Really?) frowned. “You have some sensornet damage from the Decepticon bombings,” he said, picking up a scanner and running it across Hot Rod’s helm. “It must have affected your processor.”

The first part actually seemed to be true – despite the escalating panic, Hot Rod still couldn’t move, and any attempt came with a dull, faraway pain accompanied by a sense of visceral wrongness. But it couldn’t have possibly been from the explosive – it was too consistent, across his whole frame. As far as he could tell, he hadn’t been injured at all from the bomb – the Decepticons must have dosed him with something.

Hot Rod felt his first tinge of real fear at that thought. He’d been proud of himself at seeing through all the ways Medicus had failed at his con, but he and the rest of the Decepticons had still succeeded in trapping Hot Rod and rendering him helpless. He would have to play this very carefully.

“It must have,” Hot Rod said in response to Medicus’s statement. “How long d’ya think I’ll take to heal up?” Hot Rod knew how long it took for sensornet damage to heal.

“Weeks, maybe months,” Medicus said, not bothering to disguise his frown.

Wrong.

“Excuse me, I need to report back to my CO and let him know you don’t remember the coordinates,” Medicus said, turning away from Hot Rod. “I’ll be back later.”

“Okay.” Hot Rod could almost detect air quotes around _‘don’t remember’_ , but Medicus left without giving any real indication that he knew Hot Rod was onto him.

As soon as Hot Rod was left alone, he tried moving his arm. It took all of his concentration just to lift it up from the berth, and even then, it dropped back after a few seconds. He eyed the drip line inserted into his wrist port – that must be where they were dosing him from – and imagined pulling it out. It was locked in with a complex seal, though, to prevent it from detaching It had the probably intentional side effect of ensuring that Hot Rod wouldn’t be able to remove it with his currently stiff fingers. That is, unless he was willing to tear the whole thing out and leak energon from the main line in his wrist until someone came to patch him up.

It took him three tries to get his other arm to grasp the line, and five tries to pull the needle off, the port cover with it. Then he shut off his optics, monitoring the gush of energon from his wrist and listening for the hiss of the medibay’s door, prepared to pretend that he’d been sleeping the whole time.

Strength returned to his limbs slowly but unmistakably. After a few minutes he could open and close his fist, and after a few more he could move his elbow joint with almost no difficulty. By then, his HUD was flashing with low fuel warnings, which were echoed in a beeping coming from one of the medical monitors he was hooked up to.

As soon as he was sure he could do it, he flung his arm to the side. It landed on the table next to the berth and his clumsy fingers had just enough flexibility in them to grasp the laser scalpel from the table.

He stashed the scalpel in a compartment and then waved his hand around a bit to get energon everywhere to disguise what he’d done. After that, he relaxed his body as much as possible, hoping not to actually pass out before ‘Medicus’ came to check on him. It was only another minute before the medibay doors hissed open and two sets of footsteps entered.

“Does this stuff cause spasms?” an unfamiliar voice asked.

“Dunno. Never used it before,” Medicus replied. Hot Rod kept his limbs relaxed as his arm was lifted and the port cover soldered roughly back into place. The low-fuel dizziness receded and was replaced with tingling as toxin-laced energon once again flooded his frame.

“Weird,” the other Decepticon replied, and then, miraculously, they both walked back out of the medibay.

Hot Rod onlined his optics. Now he just needed to figure out the rest of the plan.

* * *

He made his move the third night, once he was sure that no one had noticed the missing laser scalpel. The medibay was dark and empty, and days of monitoring had taught Hot Rod that it would remain so for another four hours. He onlined his optics and used the laser scalpel to make a quick cut into one main wrist line, then the other, leaking energon all over himself in the process. After a minute, his limbs worked well enough for him to undo the latch on the port cover, stopping the drip of contaminated energon into his lines. He switched off all of the medical machines attached to him and then removed the monitors from his other arm.

After he climbed shakily to his feet, the flow of energon from his wrists slowing to a trickle and his head already pounding from the low fuel pressure, he gave himself three minutes to look around the medibay for weapons. It would’ve been great to find some normal, non-toxic energon, but he didn’t trust any of the cubes he saw in a back closet – all of them looked identical to the one that had been poisoning him.

In the same closet, though, was something even better – a stash of bottles of innermost energon, dusty from sitting around, ready to explode at just a little hint of heat. Hot Rod’s chances of escape had just gotten a whole lot better.

He stashed two of the bottles in a compartment, kept hold of the laser scalpel in a hand that was no longer held hostage by poison but was starting to shake from low fuel, and walked out of the medibay. They hadn’t even bothered to lock him in.

He didn’t have time to be miffed about being underestimated. What mattered was that from here, he could follow the glowing egress signs to the back of the ship. There was a guard standing at the door that obviously led to the shuttle bay.

This was his one shot. He concentrated his energy and heated his hand enough to set one of the vials of innermost energon bubbling. Once it was ready, he tossed it at the guard’s head. It exploded as soon as it hit, sending the guard tumbling to the ground unconscious, with a bit more noise than would have been ideal.

Hot Rod knew that he had to move fast, but his frame disagreed. He stumbled and caught himself against a wall, shoving down low fuel warnings. He didn’t need the warnings to know that he had about five minutes before he collapsed, less if he tried to light up another one of the makeshift grenades.

Once he got his processor enough under control that his surroundings _mostly_ stopped spinning, he grabbed the guard’s palm and used it to get the identity verification he needed to open the door. There was a warning that the shuttle bay was incompletely pressurized, which he overrode. The door slid open, sending Hot Rod stumbling inside. The door slammed closed behind him.

Once he found his footing, he realized his mistake. Incompletely pressurized meant _in use_. Here, _in use_ meant _Decepticons_. The shuttle that was still shutting down after landing happened to be _perfect_ – sized for one or two passengers, with enough fuel capacity to get Hot Rod far away from here. If he could just hide until the occupant got off _, maybe_ –

Just then, an alarm started to sound. Hot Rod could tell that he didn’t have time to hide.

The door to the shuttle was opening. Hot Rod readied his second grenade, using all his willpower to heat up his hand until the energon bubbled. He threw it at the ‘con’s head as soon as his face was visible. The resulting explosion threw the occupant back inside before Hot Rod even got a good look at him.

Hot Rod climbed up into the ship, running on sheer force of will as low-fuel alerts did their best to drag him into unconsciousness. He tried to shove the Decepticon out, but either he was too heavy or Hot Rod was too weak. Before he could move him an inch, the shuttle bay door banged open, followed by the sounds of shouts and footsteps.

Hot Rod pushed the button to close the shuttle door. One Decepticon was better than fifty.

He stumbled to the cockpit and sank down in the pilot’s seat. First, he stopped the shuttle’s shutdown sequence and started powering the engines back up again. As soon as he could manage, he directed all of the shuttle’s firepower at the outer hatch, using the integrated guns to tear out a chunk of the door large enough for the shuttle to fit through, and hopefully large enough to slow the ship down if it tried to follow him. Not stopping to see what had happened to the Decepticons who had made it into the shuttle bay, he flew out into space and set the autopilot to continue accelerating in whatever direction he was facing.

There was a small stack of energon cubes tied down in a corner of the cockpit, and Hot Rod’s fingers shook as he unlatched the protective casing on one of them. He drank a quarter of it in small sips, until his HUD stopped trying to tell him to go into emergency stasis. His processor was now trying to tell him that he should recharge after the strain he’d put on his systems operating so intensely with such low fuel, but he was used to ignoring that.

First order of business was to make sure he was outrunning the Decepticon ship. He was, but the shuttle was far from fully fueled and wouldn’t be able to maintain this speed for long. That was a problem for future Hot Rod – now, the priority was to tie up the Decepticon he’d left unconscious by the entrance.

The explosion had knocked the ‘con offline and cracked one of his optics, but the damage looked superficial to Hot Rod’s unpracticed eye. He looked familiar, even offline with his limbs splayed out on the floor, and Hot Rod paused for a second to try and place him. Nothing came to mind, and Hot Rod forcibly cut himself off from tracing the surprisingly soft curves of the stranger’s helm with his optics, opting instead to grab some cabling from the closet outside the engine room. He lashed the con’s feet together and his arms behind his back and around one of the shuttle’s support struts.

Looking at the less damaged side of the con’s face as he worked, Hot Rod finally figured out why he’d recognized him. This wasn’t a defector, or someone he’d run into in the past. This was a face he knew only from intelligence reports, the kind that said _dangerous, run_. This was _Deadlock_.

Hot Rod finished tying his limbs, adding another layer of cabling after he recognized Deadlock’s face. He drank the rest of the energon he’d opened, ensured that he was _handily_ outrunning the Decepticon ship, and then, since recharge wasn’t an option with Deadlock on board, he kept busy by grabbing the medkit he’d seen in the supply closet and patching up the dents that the makeshift grenade had impressed on Deadlock’s chassis, shoulder, and face.

He was applying a patch to Deadlock’s cheek when Deadlock’s optics snapped unevenly online, the cracked one still only halfway through self-repair.

Hot Rod froze, his hands still touching Deadlock’s cheek where he’d been smoothing down the corners of the patch. Deadlock regarded him for several uncomfortable seconds, and finally said “What are you doing?”

That was a step above _What are you doing, Autobot scum_ , but still didn’t rule out a follow-up of _your restraints are garbage and I’m going to kill you within the next minute_. Hot Rod backed off, putting several feet of space between Deadlock, leaning against the support strut that he was tied to, and himself. He took a seat cross-legged on the floor so he was at (okay, just below) Deadlock’s eye level. “Patching you up,” he said truthfully. “The injuries are my fault, definitely not denying that.”

_“Why?”_

“Which part?”

Deadlock gave him an incredulous look and shrugged his shoulders, from which Hot Rod inferred _all of it_.

Hot Rod sighed. Sitting down had just reminded him how tired he was. His wrists hurt where the lines he’d cut were still repairing, and the tingling from the toxin was becoming prominent again in his limbs despite the normal energon cycling through his systems. “Bad timing,” he said in response to Deadlock’s question, trying to keep his optics from flickering with exhaustion. “I was just trying to escape, fair and square, but you would have killed me if I hadn’t shot first, right?”

A cautious nod from Deadlock.

“I didn’t set out to hurt you. Or anyone else. I just want to get back to my people. But I did hurt you, so I figured fixing you up was only fair.”

“Were you done?” Deadlock asked.

Hot Rod blinked. He’d expected laughter at best, Deadlock snapping his way out of his bonds to lunge over and kill him at worst. Insults in both cases. But Deadlock just sat there, perfectly still, red optics inscrutable.

It could be a trap. That didn’t stop Hot Rod from truthfully replying “No.”

“You can finish,” Deadlock said, posture relaxed and nonthreatening.

That _screamed_ trap. That was the dictionary definition of trap that new Autobots learned in the 3-step program. But what was he supposed to do? _Not_ repair Deadlock’s injuries now, after he’d already started?

He found himself picking the medical kit back up and moving forward to kneel beside Deadlock. He thought about how Deadlock hadn’t immediately lashed out when he’d awoken with Hot Rod’s hands on sensitive facial plating. Maybe Deadlock would kill him. Or maybe Deadlock was hurt, and Hot Rod was offering to help, and Deadlock was accepting. Just a normal interaction between two people, only weird for the fact that they were from different factions and one of them was keeping the other tied up.

...okay, that was still pretty weird.

The patch on Deadlock’s cheek had taken fine, so Hot Rod moved to pop out the dent in his shoulder that looked like too much for self-repair. He slid his fingers between transformation seams to get leverage and snapped the plating back into place, freeing a fuel line and a bit of sensornet that it had been pinching. He felt Deadlock’s frame relax a bit under his hands at the sudden absence of pain.

A few more quick patches and Hot Rod was done, shaky as he stepped away from Deadlock again. He couldn’t tell if it was from genuine terror at letting himself be so close to Deadlock and so vulnerable, or if his overtaxed system had burnt through the energon he’d drank faster than he’d anticipated. “I need to check the nav system,” Hot Rod said, closing up the medical kit and retreating to the cockpit.

The Decepticon ship was at the very edge of their radar by now and didn’t seem to be moving. Hot Rod spent a few minutes looking at numbers, trying to figure out why, and realized that the random direction he’d picked had them speeding toward Autobot-controlled space. The Decepticons had no way of knowing that the shuttle didn’t have nearly enough fuel to make it there.

There was a planet a few days out that Hot Rod remembered from the Iterion fortress’s database as being mechanical-friendly. It wasn’t marked as anything special on the Decepticon tech, but Hot Rod set a course for it anyway. It was a straight enough shot that the Decepticons behind them wouldn’t realize what he was doing until he was through the planet’s atmosphere, and then, after he got the shuttle refueled, they’d never catch up.

Hot Rod’s HUD unleashed another barrage of warnings, and without really thinking about it he’d picked up another one of the energon cubes from the stash in the corner. He hesitated, looking at it, every instinct he possessed screaming at him to ration it, battling with practicality which told him that his frame was still dealing with the aftereffects of the toxin, and he needed it right now.

He thought about Deadlock in back, probably poised to take advantage of any sign of weakness, and settled for drinking half the cube. The Decepticon ship slipped off the edge of his radar as he watched.

That all settled, he went back to the main area of the ship, which seemed to serve as both a berthroom and a cargo bay, and sat himself down again in front of Deadlock.

“Where do you keep energon in here?” Hot Rod asked. “I need to inventory it.” The Concendrex planet would have fuel for their shuttle, but actual energon would be hard to find and prohibitively expensive if the planet even had any. 

“The stash in the cargo bay is the last of it,” Deadlock said.

Hot Rod rolled his optics. “Please. You’re not stupid enough to keep all your fuel in one place.”

“I was, if you recall, _landing on a carrier vessel_ when you stole my ship. I didn’t expect to need it anymore. You’ll find that the shuttle’s almost out of fuel as well.”

Hot Rod didn’t bother pretending to not know that. Instead, he zeroed in on one detail. “ _Your_ ship,” he said. “This isn’t ‘property of the Decepticon cause’, then? It’s _yours_. You have to have a stash somewhere.” Hot Rod stood up. “You might as well tell me,” he said. “I’ll find it anyway, but if you just tell me where it is, I won’t stumble on your collection of severed heads or whatever while I’m looking.”

It was Deadlock’s turn to roll his eyes. “Forgive me for thinking so little of the Autobot dumb enough to repair me,” he said. “There’s a false ceiling in the closet off the engine room. Up there.”

Ah. There were the insults.

Hot Rod had to stand on a crate to reach the closet’s false ceiling, which did indeed hide the rest of Deadlock’s energon stash. It wasn’t much. _Maybe_ enough to get Hot Rod alone back to Autobot space, if he was very, very careful. If he could even afford fuel to get the shuttle all that way.

Not that running was really an option in the first place. His squad was still on Iterion, vulnerable to the Decepticon ship that had to still be in the area somewhere, their transport and communications capability wiped out with the base. At some point he’d have to figure out what to do about that.

Replacing the panel he’d removed from the false ceiling was weirdly difficult, as if there was too much gravity acting on his arms. He’d have to risk recharging soon.

His vision wavered as he tried to step down from the cargo crate he’d been standing on. In the middle of the simple maneuver, his legs froze up and he crashed to the shuttle’s floor.

He tried to climb to his feet, but none of his limbs would obey him. This wasn’t gravity, or tiredness. This was the toxin that the cons had been using on him.

He’d dealt with this before, he tried to remind himself. He just needed to –

The last thing he heard before losing consciousness was the sound of thick cables snapping apart.

* * *

Hot Rod was lying on something warm. It was such sweet relief after the constant panic and hypervigilance and discomfort of the past few days that for a few seconds, his processor refused to question it. He stayed as relaxed as he’d been in recharge, limbs splayed to absorb the heat of whatever was underneath him, the quiet rumble of an engine under his helm. Lying here was the best thing in the universe after –

After –

Hot Rod pushed hard off the body he was lying against as he came to his senses, using the momentum to stumble backward, struggling to keep his balance and online his optics.

“Calm down,” Deadlock, unmistakably Deadlock, said before Hot Rod could see him. He considered passing out again, this time from pure mortification, but curiosity urged him to keep himself upright and _finally_ his optics powered on.

Deadlock was sitting nonchalantly on the floor of the shuttle’s main space, leaning back against the same support strut that Hot Rod had tied him to. The makeshift ropes he’d broken out of were still scattered in pieces around him. He didn’t move to get up. “What happened?” Hot Rod asked.

“What happened is you almost died,” Deadlock said. That…didn’t come as much of a surprise. Hot Rod could feel his limbs shaking, weak enough now that as the immediate alarm faded, he realized he could hardly stand.

“How?” Hot Rod asked, the second thing that came to mind after _then why am I still alive?_

“The toxin that Turmoil’s crew was using to keep you compliant is called the Nova-Tera Serum. The thing that locks down your sensornet is the Nova – it’s a self-replicating nanobot that attaches itself to your sensornet and keeps it from working. The Tera is what fuels the Nova, which keeps the Nova from actually eating away at the sensornet. The ratios used in the serum are very precise. When you flushed the serum from your system, some of the Nova stayed bound to your sensornet. They replicated, and without any Tera to feed on, they started picking at you.”

“Are they still there?” Hot Rod flinched at the idea of tiny machines eating at his insides.

“No,” Deadlock said. He was silent for a beat before he added “I ran a high enough dose of Tera through your system to dislodge any that were still around.”

It was Hot Rod’s turn to say _“Why?”_

Deadlock moved a hand from his thigh to place it over his spark. Hot Rod flinched at the motion. Deadlock rolled his optics. “Because after you were so kind to me when I was injured, I couldn’t imagine not extending you the same courtesy.”

“That’s a load of rust.”

Deadlock rolled his optics again, even more obnoxiously. “Ten points to the Autobot! Yeah, it’s a load of rust. I looked at the ship’s navicomp, and it looks like I’m going to need you. Concendrex? Really?”

“It’s mech friendly.”

“It’s _’bot_ friendly, and only because your side chased off the Decepticons that tried to cyberform it ten years ago,” Deadlock said. “They see my badge, they’d probably shoot on sight, and I’m not taking off the badge. If that’s where we’re going to get fuel, it’s you who’s going to need to make the deal.”

Now Deadlock stood up, and Hot Rod took that as confirmation that he had no power over Deadlock anymore. No reason to keep standing. He stumbled over to the berth in the corner of the room and sat heavily, resting his face in his hands.

This was Deadlock’s berth, he realized belatedly, but there was no way he was standing up again now. Even sitting, the shuttle seemed to be spinning around him.

“None of that explains the cuddling,” said Hot Rod, because no one had ever accused him of having a verbal filter. 

“Your frame started going into shock and losing heat,” Deadlock said. Hot Rod effortfully raised his helm enough to track Deadlock’s movements through the shuttle. All he seemed to be doing was putting away some medical equipment that had been strewn across the cabin. “The medical drone wanted to heat the whole shuttle, but I didn’t think we could afford the fuel.”

That…was shockingly reasonable. What was less reasonable was the way Hot Rod’s frame was aching to curl back up against Deadlock, soak up his warmth, and slip back into recharge against his smooth chassis and to the sound of his engine. Hot Rod’s frame was an _idiot_ and a _traitor._

“How long was I out?” he asked to distract himself.

“About half a day. We’re still two days out from Concendrex.”

Hot Rod nodded into his hands. “You can go back to sleep if you want,” Deadlock said. “Your frame’s still recovering.”

“You could kill me and steal my badge,” Hot Rod replied.

Deadlock snorted. “I would literally rather die than put that thing on my body.”

That was a little bit reassuring, even if it mostly just made Hot Rod wonder if there were a lot of things Deadlock would rather die than do.

Deadlock stood up and put the reassembled medical kit back on its shelf. “How about this: our best chance, right now, is for us both to survive until we get to Concendrex. You’ll deal with getting my shuttle refueled, and I’ll pay for your passage to wherever you want to go. Then we part ways, and if we see each other again, we can kill each other. Sound fair?”

It was Deadlock’s cavalier line about the possibility of future murder that convinced Hot Rod he was serious. “Sounds fair.”

“Get some sleep, then. You look terrible.” With that, Deadlock walked into the cockpit where Hot Rod heard him plop down in the pilot’s seat.

Without any other real choice, Hot Rod slipped back into recharge right there on Deadlock’s berth.

* * *

Hot Rod was feeling worlds better the next time he awoke. The throbbing in his head had decreased to a dull ache, and his limbs responded to his brain like they ought to. He lay there for a few seconds soaking up the relief at finally _not_ being in pain before turning his attention to the fact that his situation, an extremely tenuous alliance with an especially dangerous Decepticon, was still a disaster.

Deadlock hadn’t killed him in his sleep, at least. That certainly counted for something.

There was one lingering unanswered question, though, that Hot Rod wanted to push on before he relaxed even a little in Deadlock’s presence. He made his way up to the cockpit. Deadlock was still in the pilot’s seat. He looked up from the datapad he was reading to glare briefly at Hot Rod.

Hot Rod’s curiosity got the better of him and he glanced at the text. “Towards Peace? _Really_?” he asked, easing himself down in the copilot’s seat. That wasn’t the question he’d had in mind, but, “Could you be any more cliché?”

Deadlock flicked the datapad off. “The title of the book wasn’t on that page. Which means that you’ve read it.” He turned his intense red gaze on Hot Rod, who barely stopped himself from squirming at the attention. “Could you get any less cliché?”

“Not all Autobots were pencil-pushers from Iacon,” Hot Rod said, which made Deadlock cock his helm in what looked like genuine curiosity. He wasn’t going to indulge it, though. “You could have turned around when I was unconscious and brought us right back to your ship. We had the fuel. We still have the fuel. You know that. Why’d you keep going?”

“You sure love pushing your luck,” Deadlock said in reply, and stood up to walk back into the cabin. For the first time, Hot Rod noticed a series of deep dents and scrapes on his forearms that must have come from breaking the cables that Hot Rod had used to tie him up.

Well. That response was baffling, but really no more so than the rest of what Deadlock had done. Not bothering to snap the restraints when he’d first woken up and killing Hot Rod on sight. Not letting Hot Rod die when he would have without Deadlock’s help. Holding Hot Rod against him on the shuttle’s floor to keep him warm.

Hot Rod pondered it all for a while, tracking Deadlock’s movements through the ship with his audials, wary of him coming back. He’d settled on the berth, which was probably still warm from Hot Rod recharging on it. Probably he was reading again.

Deadlock had been traveling presumably on his own for long enough to nearly run out of both shuttle fuel and energon. No one had chased them, and Deadlock hadn’t given any indication that the ‘cons on the ship he’d been about to land on or anyone anywhere else would be coming after him.

Was being trapped on a shuttle with Hot Rod somehow more pleasant than whatever awaited him back at the ship? Once Hot Rod had thought it, he was certain of it. It was a little sad, in theory, that Hot Rod, an enemy, was better company than Deadlock was used to, but it was flattering at the same time, and, most of all, a huge relief. It made his chances of getting out of this alive seem a little less bleak.

Hot Rod let himself relax, just a bit, and he watched the stars whip by as the shuttle progressed toward Concendrex.

* * *

Hot Rod was dozing in the pilot’s seat when he heard a crash. He jerked awake and was on his feet in an instant, scanning for the threat.

The “threat” turned out to be through the door to the engine room, behind which Deadlock was crouched. He had a screwdriver between his teeth and he was muttering curses under his breath as he tried to balance two halves of a beam that had snapped.

“What’s going on?” Hot Rod asked, hovering in the doorway. Deadlock barely glanced at him.

“Coolant system’s been on the fritz for a while,” Deadlock replied, taking the screwdriver out of his mouth. Hot Rod’s gaze hovered around Deadlock’s lips and fangs until the beam that Deadlock had been trying to fix snapped out of alignment again and Deadlock swore louder. Hot Rod stepped into the engine room, kneeling down and using his own hands to hold the pieces of the beam in place while Deadlock secured them. “The filters are overdue to be replaced, so I’ve been manually clearing them every so often. Slipped my mind when you _stole my ship_ and the system nearly redlined.”

“Nearly redlining is better than redlining,” Hot Rod said, testing the beam’s integrity with a push before releasing it.

Deadlock threw him a scathing look. “Barely.”

“If the shuttle isn’t actually going to explode, I’d say we’re good,” Hot Rod said.

“The shuttle isn’t going to explode,” Deadlock confirmed. “If we get the rest of these filters cleaned out.”

That sounded like Hot Rod was being conscripted, which he didn’t really mind, because he was, in fact, a fan of the shuttle not exploding in deep space. Deadlock showed him how to turn off coolant flow to a small section of the engine and clean out the filter. Hot Rod could pilot a ship, but he’d never served on a crew of less than five, and there had always been a designated mechanic. It was strange to see Deadlock, the assassin Hot Rod had been warned to avoid, picking dust out of coolant filters while kneeling on the floor of an engine room. Not to say that there was a single part of this whole mess that _hadn’t_ been strange.

Hot Rod had one last filter on the side of the room he’d taken. He dragged the crate he’d been standing on over to the corner and stepped up onto it. From there, his fingers just brushed the bottom of the panel that contained the filter’s release mechanism.

“Fragging pit -” He abandoned the futile effort to instead glare at Deadlock, who was now standing at the center of the engine room, chuckling at Hot Rod’s failure.

“May I?” Deadlock asked, stepping closer.

Deadlock was standing in Hot Rod’s only exit route, so Hot Rod didn’t move. He only realized Deadlock’s intention when Deadlock’s warm hands grasped either side of his waist, lifting him off the crate and into the air. Hot Rod’s processor went completely blank, and he felt his spark lurch at the intensity of the contact.

Hot Rod recovered quickly enough to punch in the release sequence for the filter, glad that he’d gotten familiar enough with it over the last few hours to dedicate all of his thoughts to the shape and strength of Deadlock’s hands, the subtle warmth of Deadlock’s frame behind him.

In that moment, it was easy to pretend that the Deadlock he’d met on this shuttle, the one who had saved Hot Rod’s life on the thinnest of excuses, was all there was to Deadlock. The half-formed concept of him that Hot Rod had from intelligence reports and kill orders was fading minute by minute, being burned away by the blithe, sarcastic, and surprisingly kind reality of him.

Hot Rod was shocked that he managed to maintain his footing when Deadlock set him down. On the floor, not on the crate, so there was almost no space between their frames. Deadlock’s hands relaxed on Hot Rod’s waist. There was a moment between the time that either of them could have moved and the time that Deadlock did when the both of them stood there, Hot Rod’s back to Deadlock’s front, closer than there was any reason for them to be.

Deadlock moved one hand to take the filter from Hot Rod and pressed the other down where it was on Hot Rod’s waist, maintaining the contact for longer than made sense and shorter than Hot Rod found himself wanting. His plating felt cold when Deadlock stepped back.

Hot Rod wiped down the tools they’d been using while Deadlock cleaned out the last filter and slid it back into place. By the time they finished, Hot Rod’s optics were straining from doing so much detail work in mediocre light. Hot Rod ended up following Deadlock to the cockpit, collapsing next to him in the copilot’s seat.

Without a word, Deadlock handed him a cube of energon. Hot Rod took it and hesitated, pushing down instincts that still screamed about stricter rationing. This situation was certainly going to implode before the two of them ran out of energon, but that didn’t come as much of a comfort. He uncapped the cube and took a sip.

“You read Towards Peace _before the war_ ,” Deadlock said, keeping his gaze out the window and studiously off of Hot Rod as he sipped from his own cube.

“So what if I did?” Hot Rod replied.

Deadlock was silent for long enough that Hot Rod thought he might have dropped the subject. Then he asked, “Why’d you join the Autobots?”

Hot Rod barked out a laugh, all he could do in his shock at the question.

“What’s so funny?”

“Autobots don’t ask each other that,” Hot Rod said, even though most of the hilarity was in the concept of telling _anyone_ , especially a stranger and an enemy besides, the full story.

“‘Cons do,” Deadlock said. “Or, well, we used to.”

“Why’d you stop?” Hot Rod asked, grasping at the chance to direct the conversation away from himself.

“People’s answers started changing,” Deadlock replied, staring out the window ahead of them. “Less ‘Megatron made me feel seen for the first time in my life’ and more ‘I wanted to kill people’ or ‘The cons took over my city and it was join or die.’”

“What was your answer?”

“It was a reason to live.”

“That’s what you _told people_? I thought Decepticons were supposed to be ruthless killing machines who didn’t experience feelings.”

“It used to be different.”

“No it didn’t,” Hot Rod said, before he realized that now he was going to have to explain himself. “The Decepticons were never what Megatron said he wanted them to be. Not for a minute.”

Deadlock didn’t respond. 

Hot Rod didn’t have to continue, he knew. He and Deadlock could very well just sit here in mountingly awkward silence until they reached Concendrex. But he’d started talking, and now something was pushing him to explain. Something about Deadlock’s questions, Deadlock’s _presence_ , and maybe on top of it the fact that Hot Rod had kept silent about this since… “Do you remember hearing about Nyon?”

“Yeah.” Now Deadlock was looking at him, curiosity in his red optics.

“I was there,” Hot Rod said, and even that small fact, practically a lie for how much it omitted, felt like it was exposing his entire spark to the low-quality recycled air of the shuttle.

Deadlock nodded once, slowly, and Hot Rod remembered that there’d been a point he was trying to make.

“Megatron tried to recruit me, after. He was a hell of an orator, I’ll give him that. But we walked in on his people torturing the people that I – we – the people who had tried to help save Nyon. People who believed most of the same things Megatron said he did, people who he should have been making allies of, with everything that was going on at the time. But no, to him those small differences in ideology were worth torturing people over. Even then.”

Deadlock nodded in acknowledgement, and then his expression turned skeptical. “Do you think the Autobots have done a better job upholding their ideology?”

Hot Rod would have denied the point, then he remembered the things Deadlock had already said about his own faction. “Marginally better.”

Deadlock didn’t push on that. “I’m sorry about Nyon,” he said instead. “That must have been awful.”

“Thanks,” Hot Rod said. In the silent moments after, he realized that he meant it.

* * *

Deadlock passed Hot Rod the comm link when the Concendrex spaceport responded to their hail. “This is Hot Rod of the Autobots, requesting permission to land,” Hot Rod said.

After a few questions from one of the Concendrex in shaky Neo-Cybex, they were cleared.

“Hot Rod, huh?”

“Did you not know my name?”

“How would I have known your name?”

“Well, you could have asked.”

“You could have told me.”

“You didn’t ask.”

Deadlock took the rattling noises of the shuttle entering the atmosphere as a cop-out from responding to that, and by the time they landed at the spaceport, there were bigger things on both of their minds.

“Do they take Shanix here?” Deadlock asked, reaching into a compartment and pulling out what looked like currency cards from multiple planets.

“Yeah, but the exchange rate is criminal. Might as well use GC Standards if you’ve got any.”

Deadlock took that in without comment and handed Hot Rod a currency card written in Standard.

“Buy something nice for yourself, sweetspark,” Hot Rod said in a mockery of Deadlock’s low-pitched voice.

“If you must,” Deadlock said, and he hadn’t killed Hot Rod on the spot for that, so maybe this would actually turn out alright. “You remember the deal?”

“Fill the shuttle with fuel, buy myself a ticket someplace, give you your card back, and we’ll each be on our merry ways.”

“And if you don’t buy fuel for the shuttle and give me my card back?”

They hadn’t talked about this, but it was easy enough to understand Deadlock’s point. “You’ll track me down and kill me.”

Deadlock nodded. “Get out of here.”

Hot Rod did. Absurdly, he wasn’t thrilled to step out of the Decepticon shuttle into the crowded port. He’d gotten used to Deadlock in the few days they’d been crowded together on his ship, and the casual camaraderie was a tangible loss. Deadlock’s wit and terrible attitude would have been a welcome addition to Hot Rod’s attempts at navigating this viscerally foreign place.

Hot Rod missed him, he realized, after puzzling through all those thoughts. He was going to miss him when all of this was over. Ugh.

He’d deal.

The first thing he did was make his way to the attendant at the fueling station attached to the spaceport and arrange for the employees there to fill the shuttle for him. There was an extra charge for the labor, but Deadlock’s currency card didn’t protest. Next, he made his way to a list of passenger shuttles that were departing within the day.

He frowned. All this time he’d been focusing on surviving to the next step of the plan, but it occurred to him as he looked at the destinations that the plan ended here. He needed to get back to Iterion and let Ironhide and the rest know that he hadn’t died. He was the only one from the Iterion base in a position to warn the other Autobots about the attack and get the Autobots still on Iterion a new spaceship. The nearest Autobot base that wasn’t Iterion was on Halihul, which none of ships were going to and besides, he’d need energon to get that far and didn’t expect that stealing from Deadlock would go over well.

After puzzling over it for a few minutes, he bought a ticket to Ramordia, where he remembered from the Iterion base’s maps that there was a population of Cybertronian neutrals. He’d be able to work for energon there, almost definitely, and hopefully they’d have deep space communications equipment that he could use to contact the rest of the Autobots. The plan hinged on a lot of ifs, but it was the best Hot Rod had.

When he stepped up to buy the ticket, the booth attendant eyed his badge with skepticism. “Deserting?” they asked.

 _None of your business,_ Hot Rod almost said, before he realized that that response was only at the front of his mind because it was what he imagined Deadlock would have said. Unwilling to explain his situation to this stranger, though, he just replied “Never.”

The booth attendant rolled all six of their eyes and handed Hot Rod Deadlock’s card back, along with a slip stamped with the time the ship left. “Under the wire,” they commented. “Transport to Ramordia only leaves about once a local month.”

“Guess I’m in luck,” said Hot Rod. The booth attendant waved him off and turned to assist their next customer.

And that was it. After a cursory and unsuccessful search for anything that would supplement his and Deadlock’s fuel supply, Hot Rod had nothing to do but return to the ship. He spent the whole walk wondering what he’d say. Deadlock was his enemy, but this whole time, he’d been cordial, even friendly. It had been nice, and Hot Rod would almost rather throw the currency card back into the ship and run than have to look Deadlock in the eye and face the fact that their alliance for survival was over, that if they saw each other again, it wouldn’t be to have a conversation.

But Hot Rod wasn’t a coward, so he opened the door to the ship to hand Deadlock his currency card in person.

The ship was empty. Hot Rod searched the cockpit, cabin, and engine room, which, all told, took him about ten seconds. There was nowhere for Deadlock to have gone. Decepticons were banned from this planet and Hot Rod couldn’t think of a reason for him to have taken such a massive risk as to leave.

He was starting to wonder if this was somehow some kind of betrayal of _him_ when he noticed the bullet holes.

Hot Rod hadn’t been in the system for the Battle of Concendrex, but Ironhide had briefed them all on the local situation when they’d first been posted on Iterion. The Concendrex, to combat the Decepticon invasion, had invented a concentrated EMP in the form of a bullet that cut through living metal and had the ability to knock a Cybertronian offline for hours. The combination of the force and concentrated disruption of electrical systems left a messy hole wherever on the body they hit.

Two of the shots had made gouges in the interior of the shuttle, exposing charred insulation within the walls. And since Deadlock wasn’t here, presumably another shot hadn’t missed.

Hot Rod started up a reboot on the shuttle’s systems. The terminal in front of him flickered to life. He could just _go_. They had, before or after taking Deadlock, fully fueled the shuttle. Hot Rod could make it back to Iterion or to Ramordia with this, maybe even to Autobot-controlled space if he was careful with the rest of the energon.

Wherever he went, it was undeniable that taking the shuttle and leaving right now was the best thing for the Autobot cause.

He sat down in the pilot’s seat and found himself thinking about Deadlock.

Hot Rod could leave him here and be one _thousand_ percent justified in doing so. He knew Deadlock’s war record. These strange few days were nothing in the face of all the Autobots he’d killed, all the neutrals and organics he’d helped to kill. But it was the physical reality of Deadlock at the forefront of Hot Rod’s mind now, as he breathed in the familiar aroma of low-quality recycled air and engine exhaust. Deadlock just behind Hot Rod, both of them standing still for a little too long in the engine room. Deadlock handing him energon when he didn’t have to. Deadlock’s telling silences and strange, probing questions.

Leaving him here to suffer whatever fate the Concendrex had in mind was the best thing to do for the Autobot cause. And maybe it would be better in the grand scheme of the universe to leave him here where, whatever else happened, they’d stop him from killing more people.

Hot Rod thought about the soft curves of Deadlock’s helm, the gleam of a fang under Deadlock’s sardonic smirks, Deadlock’s engine rumbling softly beneath Hot Rod’s cheek after Deadlock had _saved his life_.

Hot Rod stood up. He tucked Deadlock’s currency card, which he’d had in hand to give back, into a compartment. He exited the shuttle and added minutes to the parking meter. The transport to Ramordia was leaving in half a local hour. If Hot Rod didn’t get on it now, there was almost no chance he’d make it in time.

He’d made his decision. He’d get Deadlock away from this place, and then he’d think of a new plan.

Hot Rod marched up to the first security guard he saw. They came up to his hip, standing above the majority of the crowd around them. “I seem to be missing my companion,” Hot Rod said, figuring he’d keep it cordial at least until he had Deadlock in his line of sight, even though the EMP damage to the shuttle was something that he’d have every right to be pissed about if the shuttle was, in fact, his.

The guard lifted their optical ridges, or whatever the organic version of that was called. “You were with the Decepticon?”

Hot Rod didn’t have a plan when he opened his mouth, but in the nick of time, a plan came to him. “He’s not a Decepticon. He’s undercover.” It wasn’t a good lie. He wasn’t even sure if Deadlock would manage to swallow his pride enough to confirm it. But he’d said it, and now he had to see it through.

Something like shock passed across the guard’s face. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“We didn’t expect that anyone would be breaking into our ship.”

The guard tapped on a device in their audial and spoke quietly into it. Hot Rod waited until they were finished. Soon enough, another organic in one of the security uniforms showed up. “Come with me,” they said. Across the station, Hot Rod heard the last call for boarding the transport to Ramordia.

He followed the guard out of the shuttle bay and further into the port. They passed through a concourse filled with shops selling souvenirs and organic food, and from there the guard led Hot Rod into a hallway that opened with a swipe of the guard’s badge. Hot Rod had to duck to get through the doorway, but thankfully the ceiling of the hallway on the other side was tall enough for him to stand up straight.

The guard led him down the hallway and through another door, nodding at the second guard outside of it. Past the door was a cell with laser-powered bars. Inside the cell lay Deadlock, flat on his face, unmoving.

A jolt of fear shot through Hot Rod’s frame, one too overpowering for him to dismiss or reason away. “Let me in there,” he demanded, chastising himself for the note of anxiety he could hear in his own voice before assuring himself that it was fine – theoretically, it could be part of the fiction he’d been spinning.

A section of the bars winked away and Hot Rod rushed in, kneeling down at Deadlock’s side. From here the damage from the EM bullet was visible, a dent in Deadlock’s back surrounded by gnarled wiring and crusted energon. Hot Rod tucked a hand under Deadlock’s hip and eased his frame upward until he was leaning upright against the wall, legs splayed on the floor.

It occurred to Hot Rod, as he pressed the back of his hand to Deadlock’s neck to quickly check his temperature, that Deadlock could easily kill him like this. If Deadlock’s systems reset at the manhandling and his optics winked online now, Deadlock could reach forward and crush Hot Rod’s throat, could probably pull out one of any number of hidden weapons and take him down. But Hot Rod found himself caring about that less than he cared about Deadlock’s slightly too-cool frame, his darkened optics, the twitches indicating that aberrant charge was still running through him from the EM shot.

Hot Rod knew that the symptoms would go away on their own after a few hours – there were only a few reported cases of a Cybertronian being killed by one of these things, and all of them had been shot by multiple bullets. The thing was, Hot Rod didn’t want to wait a couple hours. He wanted to see Deadlock’s optics scrutinize their surroundings and narrow at Hot Rod when another bot would be outright laughing at him. He wanted Deadlock’s frame warm and moving, without tiny spasms from the disrupted flow of charge. He wanted Deadlock awake, now, here, so that they could figure out what to do next together.

Hot Rod unfurled his hardline cable and braced himself, venting in and out a few times in preparation for what he was about to do. A stable frame could absorb enough of the excess charge that the affected bot’s systems could reboot and clear away the remainder, but Hot Rod had been assured that it would hurt like hell.

He thought about Deadlock’s optics, sincere on Hot Rod’s. He thought about Deadlock’s hands efficiently changing out coolant filters, Deadlock’s hands on Hot Rod’s frame. He thought about Deadlock’s engine, rumbling comfortingly against his back. He plugged in the cable.

Pain slammed through him like a tidal wave. Distantly, he heard a scream and realized after that it had come from him. The moment seemed like it would never end, and then it did, Hot Rod’s sensornet dealing with the excess charge and stabilizing, leaving him weak-limbed and exhausted.

As soon as Hot Rod’s attention returned to his surroundings, Deadlock was already moving, his hands going to his helm as his frame recalibrated itself.

“Hey,” Hot Rod said, his voice gravelly from the strain of what he’d just done. His cable was still hooked into Deadlock’s side, and he didn’t quite trust his still-shaky hand to remove it.

Deadlock looked at him, optics blazing, and Hot Rod’s spark stuttered at either the attention or the aftereffects of the charge exchange. It took more effort than it should have to tear his gaze away.

“Sorry about all this,” Hot Rod said, gesturing to the bars in front of them and the guard who was openly staring at the two of them from next to the door. “Security here thought that you were an actual Decepticon, and not, you know, my undercover partner.”

Deadlock’s expression had morphed to skepticism. One hand was still curled around the side of his helm, holding it up. Hot Rod flashed one optic off and on again in a wink. It was unsubtle, but unsubtle seemed like what Deadlock might need.

“I’m gonna unplug this now,” Hot Rod said, lifting the hardline cable into Deadlock’s line of sight. It was the best way he knew how to warn Deadlock, but Deadlock jumped at the sight of it anyway, and would have crashed to the floor on still-unsteady limbs if Hot Rod hadn’t caught his shoulder in reflex.

Deadlock could have killed him then, Hot Rod reflected as their optics met. But he didn’t. Instead, he relaxed back against the wall and moved his arm to give Hot Rod better access to his port.

Hot Rod unplugged his cable and coiled it back up, aware of Deadlock’s optics on him the whole time. His frame felt like it had recovered entirely from the shock of wayward charge, but Deadlock still looked shaky. “Think you can stand?” Hot Rod asked as soon as his port was safely covered.

Instead of answering, Deadlock put his hands on the floor to lever himself up, then winced as the motion must have pulled at broken cables in his back. Without thinking, Hot Rod moved to help him, like he would have done for any of his allies. Deadlock jerked away from Hot Rod’s hands on his plating for a fraction of a second, and then leaned into the touch, wrapping a hand around Hot Rod’s forearm to allow Hot Rod to pull him to his feet.

“Can we go back to our ship now?” Hot Rod asked. Deadlock’s hand was still wrapped around Hot Rod’s arm, tight enough that it was probably doing a large part in steadying his weakened frame. Hot Rod resisted the urge to put an arm around Deadlock’s waist.

“Of course,” the guard said, waving them forward. They’d never closed the gap in the bars that Hot Rod had come in through, and now they waved the both of them back out. “You must understand the reason for our vigilance,” they said as they watched Deadlock struggle to navigate forward, still using Hot Rod for balance.

“Of course,” Deadlock said, his vocalizer still raspy from the EM shot. “We should have warned you that I was an Autobot spy.” His voice was neutral enough, but Hot Rod still got the distinct impression that he was being laughed at.

 _It wasn’t a good lie, but the point is that it worked,_ Hot Rod mentally composed, to tell Deadlock when they were safely back on the ship.

The guard led them back to the shuttle bay, Deadlock growing steadier on his feet as they went. He never let go of Hot Rod, though, even after Hot Rod suspected that he probably could have. “We can take it from here,” Hot Rod said, waving the guard off. Amazingly, the guard simply nodded and turned away, presumably to go back to their usual post.

“I can’t believe that worked,” Deadlock muttered into Hot Rod’s audial as they crossed the final few pathways to Deadlock’s ship.

“Then you underestimated me,” Hot Rod said as he used his free hand to open the door into the ship. He walked inside with Deadlock still holding onto his arm and closed the door behind him, walking over to the berth to sit down. Deadlock sat beside him and let go of Hot Rod’s arm to lean back on his elbows.

“Alright,” Deadlock said. “What do you want?”

Hot Rod looked at him, trying to figure out what step of the conversation he’d missed. “Huh?”

Deadlock shifted closer. Hot Rod could feel the air running through his vents. “You were walking around freely. You could have taken the ship and gone wherever you wanted,” Deadlock said. “But you came back for me. Why? What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything from you,” Hot Rod said. Deadlock’s optics were on him, incredulous and unconvinced. So Hot Rod continued with a detail he wouldn’t have divulged a few hours, much less a few days ago. “I wanted you to be safe.” And seeing Deadlock here, whole and alive and next to Hot Rod, Hot Rod didn’t regret a thing.

Deadlock leaned over and kissed him.

Hot Rod’s frame responded to the kiss with a rush of wanting. He let himself wrap his hands around Deadlock’s upper arms, ran his tongue lightly along the edge of a fang, then lay back on the berth, pulling Deadlock down on top of him. Deadlock’s solid frame, the care with which he kissed, the urgency in his optics in the brief glimpse Hot Rod caught of them all flooded him as he finally let himself appreciate the feelings he’d been beating down for days.

Then Deadlock’s limbs locked up in a wince and the spell broke. Hot Rod remembered that Deadlock was hurt, and that fact started a rolling chain of doubts about this that had Hot Rod pushing Deadlock gently back upright and away from him, breaking the kiss, before any of the thoughts were fully formed. Deadlock moved with him, hands heavy on Hot Rod’s waist, allowing Hot Rod’s lips to slip away but keeping their foreheads pressed together. Hot Rod reveled in the closeness for as long as his processor let him before it yet again started screaming things like _he’s hurt,_ and _Decepticon assassin_ , and _we’re not safe on Concendrex_.

“You’re hurt,” Hot Rod said aloud, instead of any of the real mood-killers.

“I’m fine,” Deadlock insisted, and that was enough to get Hot Rod to break away from him entirely.

“Sure you are,” he said, releasing Deadlock’s shoulders and mourning the loss of Deadlock’s hands on his plating as he stood up from the berth. “You said you had a med drone in here?”

Deadlock was slightly hunched in on himself now, sitting upright on the berth. “It’s plugged in on the top shelf over there.”

Hot Rod had to stand on a crate to get to it, but he managed to unplug it and flick it on, carrying it over to the berth. He put a hand on Deadlock’s shoulder to ease him down face-first onto the berth. Deadlock didn’t fight him, and something inspired Hot Rod to leave his hand resting on the curve of Deadlock’s shoulder as the medical drone hovered away from him to scan the nasty-looking wound. When it was done scanning, the screen on the drone’s side displayed a map of the wound in blues where self-repair was working and reds where something – debris from circuitry that the bullet had rendered entirely nonfunctional, in this case – was inhibiting it.

Hot Rod fetched a pair of tweezers from a box beneath the shelf the drone had been on and started picking out the problem debris. Deadlock had his head pillowed on his arms as Hot Rod worked, and as the minutes stretched, he turned his optics off in a display of trust that simultaneously terrified and warmed Hot Rod.

“Finished,” he said when the med drone’s screen had changed entirely to blues and greens and Hot Rod had placed a patch over the raw area. Deadlock’s optics flicked back on and he gingerly sat up while Hot Rod carried the med drone back to its charging port.

“One of those things hit the ship,” Deadlock said as he climbed to his feet. “Did you happen to see the damage?”

“It knocked the ship offline, but I started a reboot before I went to find you,” Hot Rod said. With almost anyone else he would have turned that into a joke about his priorities, but the idea of Deadlock being important to him was strange enough and fragile enough that it didn’t feel like the right time.

Deadlock walked into the cockpit while Hot Rod finished putting the medical supplies away. “We need to get out of here,” he called. Hot Rod felt the ship’s ground thrusters powering on under him.

“Just a minute,” Hot Rod said, snapping the supports on the set of shelves closed to protect the contents for transport. The ship was already moving when he finished, making him stumble as he made his way to the cockpit. “Jeez. A little warning next time?”

“We didn’t have a minute.” Hot Rod barely managed to grab onto his seat for support as Deadlock went into an evasive barrel roll that was definitely super illegal at this altitude. For the split second that the ship’s nose pointed down, Hot Rod noticed the dozen organics with guns that surrounded the place they’d just been in the spaceport. They fired upward as the shuttle quickly sailed out of range.

“Good timing,” Hot Rod said, slowly relaxing as they broke atmosphere. For a moment, Hot Rod was content to relax back into his seat, recovering from the latest in a series of close calls. Then, “Wait. Where are we going?”

“Away from here?” Deadlock’s voice was condescending, which was oddly comforting – _away_ was, in fact, the most important detail.

And if Deadlock didn’t have an opinion – “The transport I was going to take was going to Ramordia,” Hot Rod said. “I suppose we can’t go there now, they might follow us.”

Deadlock was silent.

“Deadlock? We have to pick a direction soon.”

“They’re not going to follow us,” he said, punching a series of coordinates into the nav system.

“Is this really the time for bravado?”

“It’s not bravado.” Deadlock looked at Hot Rod as if whatever he was about to say was Hot Rod’s fault somehow. “Before they ambushed me, I was listening to the local space transmissions. The Concendrex military has recalled all the ships in the area to defend the planet. They won’t waste one to follow us.”

“Okay, _why_?”

Deadlock sighed and looked at Hot Rod accusingly again. “Because there was a Worldsweeper spotted on its way into the system.”

Panic seized Hot Rod’s frame. Deadlock didn’t seem to notice and kept speaking.

“It’s still way too far out for comms, so it makes sense for the Concendrex to panic, but I bet it’s here to trace the residual matter transporter energy to figure out where the Autobots that were on Iterion went. Of course, Concendrex probably doesn’t even know about that attack because Iterion and Concendrex don’t talk to each other.”

Deadlock looked over at Hot Rod, who barely noticed. His spark was vibrating nauseatingly at the thought of that Worldsweeper discovering that there had never been a matter transporter on Iterion at all, and mostly at the thought of what would happen next.

“What’s wrong? It’s not like I’m hauling you in. Not after all this.”

The admission that Deadlock prioritized Hot Rod above the Decepticons was one that would have been shocking at another time, but now barely registered. “That’s where they picked me up. Iterion.”

“Yeah, I figured. They were probably keeping you alive because they wanted to get the transporter coordinates from you.”

Hot Rod nodded. He was desperate to spill the real reason for his panic, but knew that telling Deadlock that the Autobots were still on Iterion would be a betrayal that no one, if he survived this, would ever forgive him for. So he just sat there, staring resolutely out the windshield, trying to shove it away.

He could feel Deadlock’s optics on him. Hot Rod shut his own. Deadlock started to speak. “What’s going on? You’re not scared of Turmoil and the others that had you captive. I know you’re not.”

Hot Rod couldn’t bring himself to speak, couldn’t think of what to say to dissuade Deadlock from what he was about to figure out.

“Wherever your squad ported to, they’d either be in heavily guarded Autobot space where a single Worldsweeper can’t touch them or well on their way to it,” Deadlock said. “All the ‘cons – all _we_ are doing here is figuring out where the Autobots think they’re safest. It’s reconnaissance, it’s information that they’re not going to use for years. So your friends aren’t in any special amount of danger, unless –”

Hot Rod felt his ventilations hitch.

“Unless they’re still on Iterion.” At least Deadlock didn’t sound triumphant when he said it. His voice contained, ridiculously, compassion. That was what sent Hot Rod into full-blown hysterics, Deadlock’s _acknowledgement_ of the unchangeable fact that Hot Rod’s squad was going to be wiped out because Hot Rod had been the only one to get off the planet and he hadn’t managed to find a way to protect them.

He wasn’t sure what he expected Deadlock to do, but what Deadlock did was give him space. He sat quietly next to Hot Rod, his even ventilations a steady sound to ground Hot Rod as his own choked ones eased off, as the panic thrumming through his processor quieted into urgency. “You’ll take me to Ramordia?” Hot Rod asked, hoping.

“Yeah, I can take you to Ramordia,” Deadlock said. He didn’t move to change anything about the shuttle’s course – he’d already programmed it in, Hot Rod realized.

For that moment, his limbs still shaking and processor buzzing from lingering panic, Hot Rod didn’t care about Deadlock’s motivations. He didn’t care that Deadlock was a Decepticon, he didn’t care what Deadlock could do to him. He moved over in his seat so that he could slump his frame against Deadlock’s side. “Thanks,” he said quietly into Deadlock’s chest plating.

Deadlock’s brought his arm up around Hot Rod’s shoulders, pulling him closer, and it was everything Hot Rod needed.

* * *

The journey to Ramordia took five days. The sense of being cut off from everything around them was nearly intolerable – the shuttle’s radar wasn’t good enough to track how quickly the Worldsweeper was progressing toward Iterion, or whether Turmoil’s ship was coming after them or if, improbably, a ship from Concendrex was chasing them down. Their shuttle may as well have been lost in space, floating through nothing.

The only good thing about those days was Deadlock.

They kissed. They did more than kiss. When they interfaced, Hot Rod’s world seemed to narrow down to the two of them. The endless expanse of blackness around them, the place they’d come from and the one they were moving toward, and the decisions they’d have to make when they got there all seemed to disappear. Hot Rod wanted, in those moments, to escape to a place that was filled with nothing but Deadlock’s frame, his rare smiles and gentle, precise hands. In the moments they were apart, he tried to school himself about it: this couldn’t last. The war still raged around them, even though it seemed invisible from the cramped interior of Deadlock’s ship.

They didn’t talk, was the key. They spoke to each other, but never about anything important. Never about the world that lay ahead of them after the next few days. Instead they ‘faced, and slept, and watched vids on a datapad while curled against each other on the berth. Hot Rod wished that time would stop, that he could have as much of this as Deadlock would be willing to give him before moving on.

Time didn’t stop, though, and far too soon Ramordia was visible outside the front windshield. Deadlock obtained permission to land at the planet’s small Cybertronian settlement without looking at Hot Rod, who was sitting next to him in the copilot’s seat.

Very soon, Hot Rod was going to walk away from this ship. Deadlock was going to drop Hot Rod off, probably buy himself some energon and shuttle fuel, and go back to the Decepticons. The end of their laughable pact for survival and everything that it had turned into was in sight, a physical presence out the windshield.

Deadlock had to be at the controls to make the final approach into the Ramordia spaceport, and Hot Rod spent the last few hours of their voyage next to him, silent, wondering if they’d already kissed for the last time. Wondering whether a grand ending or a quiet whisper of a goodbye was what he wanted.

Hot Rod still didn’t know the answer when Deadlock landed the shuttle and the engines started to cycle down. When Deadlock broke the silence with “You think they have engex here?” Hot Rod was grateful for the implied additional time to decide.

“They’d better,” he said, standing up from the copilot’s seat. Deadlock followed suit. Hot Rod waited while Deadlock stashed the dwindling remains of his energon in the closet’s false ceiling. Hot Rod exited the shuttle first, stepping out into chilly, strange air.

There was a series of communication booths within eyesight, and Hot Rod barely managed to turn towards Deadlock before he made for them. “I need to make this phone call first,” he said, and Deadlock simply nodded in response. Hot Rod was hit with the irrational urge to say _sorry_ even though he wasn’t – doing what little he could to protect his people came first.

He didn’t look back to make sure Deadlock was waiting for him. If he wasn’t, Hot Rod didn’t want to know.

He punched in a familiar frequency, winced at the price of the long-distance call and slid his currency card into the machine anyway, shifting from foot to foot as he waited in the queue for satellite time. After just a few minutes, the call connected.

“This is Blaster, Communications Officer on the Autobot troop carrier Valkyrie. Who’s this?”

“Blaster! It’s Hot Rod.”

“Hot Rod? Weren’t you – wait, did you and your crew make it off of that backwater?”

“Just me,” Hot Rod said. Before Blaster could react to that, he continued with the story of the surprise attack by the Decepticons and the contingency plan that the rest of the group had employed. “There’s apparently a Worldsweeper in the system, and I think it’s headed for them.”

“Way ahead of you,” Blaster said. “The Valkyrie’s already on its way to intercept. Our current course has us getting to Iterion neck in neck with the Worldsweeper.”

Relief flooded Hot Rod’s frame. He hadn’t failed his squad after all. He spent a moment recovering, remembering what it was like to live without the constant fear that he’d gotten his friends killed. “I made it to the neutral settlement on Ramordia. Can I get a pickup when you pass by?”

The line was silent for a minute, muffled voices in the background saying things that Hot Rod didn’t quite catch. Then Blaster’s voice was back. “That’s a negative, sorry.”

“ _What_?”

“We’ve got enough troops to take on six of those things on here. We don’t need you. After we reestablish the base on Iterion, we’ll send someone.”

Hot Rod’s whole frame had gone numb. “That’s my squad that’s stuck in there. I want to help fight.”

Some more quiet conversations in the background. “Uh, the boss-man says that you should have thought of that before getting yourself stranded on Ramordia. If you can find yourself a ship, we’ll work out a rendezvous, but otherwise you’re just going to have to sit tight.”

“Thanks Blaster,” Hot Rod said, and he hung up. Having the last word didn’t make him feel nearly as much better as he’d hoped that it would.

He wanted to hit something. It wouldn’t be that much trouble to send someone with a shuttle to pick him up. Prime was making him wait just to teach him some sort of lesson and he didn’t know how he was going to handle it. He almost called back, almost begged to speak to Prime himself and make his case, but he knew that he’d only be digging himself in deeper. Prime wanted Hot Rod to understand that he had to trust other people to save the day this time, to understand that he wasn’t necessary.

Someone rapped on the door of the booth and Hot Rod was jerked back to awareness of his surroundings. He walked out, letting the badgeless minibot who’d knocked on the door into the booth after him, and only then did he remember that he’d left Deadlock waiting.

Deadlock had hardly moved – he was leaning against a pole, scanning the thin crowd of people crisscrossing the spaceport. Half of Hot Rod didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t want to awaken the latent guilt that came with wanting to be near Deadlock. The other half of him desperately wanted a hug.

He settled for walking up to Deadlock and schooling his face into something resembling normal, trying to imagine what he’d look like if the Autobots hadn’t just told him that he could just as well be left behind. “You mentioned engex?”

He didn’t think that he’d done a very good job of fooling Deadlock, but Deadlock didn’t ask any questions. Deadlock led Hot Rod to a bar just outside the spaceport, guided him to a corner booth where they could sit next to each other with their hips pressed together and their backs against the wall, and ordered them drinks. After seeing how quickly Hot Rod downed his, he ordered them more drinks.

Hot Rod let himself lean against Deadlock’s side, let himself relish it when Deadlock’s arm made its way around his shoulders. Occasionally his processor spat out half-formed plans for how he could make it to the Valkyrie from here with no local contacts and almost no money, but none of them were nearly good enough.

“What happened?” Deadlock asked, four drinks in, when the engex was finally starting to soften the edges of the outside world.

“They knew about the Worldsweeper. There’s a troop carrier on its way to intercept it.” Some part of Hot Rod’s processor protested that he shouldn’t be telling Deadlock these things. But a larger part of him knew that both of them had passed the point of no return in some way, that some of the rules he would have followed before meeting Deadlock were obsolete now.

“Isn’t that…good?” Deadlock still had an arm secured around Hot Rod, and Hot Rod was dimly aware that he was clinging to Deadlock, fingers twined into his to keep his arm from moving. Hot Rod’s helm rested against Deadlock’s shoulder.

“Yeah. It’s good.”

Deadlock didn’t ask what was wrong, but by now, Hot Rod knew him. He knew that he wanted to know.

“They’re not sending a shuttle to pick me up until after the battle.”

“Ah.” Deadlock didn’t say anything else, which was good, because Hot Rod didn’t know what he would have wanted him to say.

They only left the bar when they were shooed out at closing, and by then it was too late for Deadlock to buy himself any supplies, so they both went back to Deadlock’s ship. Deadlock kissed him there, slow and sweet, crowding Hot Rod against a wall, letting Hot Rod wrap his legs around Deadlock’s waist. Hot Rod was conscious every second that this kiss might be their last, and, hazy with engex, managed to fall into recharge anyway.

* * *

In the morning, the silence of the parked ship was eerie after falling into recharge here so many times to the sound of the engines as they made their way through space. Deadlock was already awake beside Hot Rod, limbs still twined around him, holding a datapad in one hand.

Hot Rod’s curiosity got the better of him and he snuck a peak at the text. _Towards Peace_ again. Upon noticing Hot Rod’s wandering eyes, Deadlock shut down the datapad and set it to the side, resting the hand that had been holding it against Hot Rod’s waist.

Hot Rod buried his helm into the crook of Deadlock’s neck, unwilling to move from the berth and on with their lives. There was no reason for Deadlock not to leave today, and Hot Rod would be stuck here until the Valkyrie had fought the Decepticons off from Iterion. Hot Rod didn’t want to face either of those facts.

“We could stay here,” Deadlock said, quietly, neutrally. 

Hot Rod nodded, his helm brushing against Deadlock’s chin. Staying here for another few hours sounded nice. But that couldn’t be all there was to it, Hot Rod gradually realized. There was something significant in Deadlock’s choice of words, in the weird tension in his frame that made Hot Rod think he’d been bracing himself to say it. “Hm?”

Deadlock took Hot Rod’s hand in one of his. Hot Rod eased up so he could look at Deadlock, not sure what he was trying to say. “We could stay here,” Deadlock repeated, something more serious in his tone. “Or go somewhere else. Stay together. Be neutrals.”

“Oh,” was all Hot Rod could say to that at first. His processor seemed to halt at the unexpected overture, trying and failing to work this desire into his view of Deadlock. But despite the shock of it, despite the warm feeling that Deadlock had, once again, picked _him_ , Hot Rod knew immediately what his answer had to be. “No. I’m not doing that.”

“They don’t care about you,” Deadlock said, his voice gentle. His hand was still on Hot Rod’s waist, their legs tangled together on the berth. “They’re leaving you stranded here for no real reason – you said so yourself.”

Hot Rod had, and there was no point in denying it now. “I care about them,” he said instead. “I won’t abandon them.”

Deadlock turned away from him, disentangling their frames. Hot Rod shivered at the loss of his warmth as Deadlock crossed the room and opened a drawer, shoving his collection of currency cards and a few other things into compartments in his frame. “Take the shuttle,” he said when he seemed to be done, clutching the edges of a drawer with both hands, still not looking at Hot Rod. “If the ship they’re sending is already in the system, you should have plenty of fuel.”

“What? Deadlock, I can’t –”

“I’m not doing this for you,” he said. “Plausible deniability. Claiming that you held me unconscious this whole time and dumped me here when you realized you couldn’t use me as a bargaining chip is the best shot I have at getting away with this.”

“You don’t have to go back,” Hot Rod said, clambering to a seated position on the berth. Even though he knew he’d made the right choice, his spark felt like it was being torn in two. “ _You_ could stay here.”

Deadlock looked at him, finally, his optics practically flaring with emotion and his mouth twisted in pain. “It’s not worth it,” he said. “It’s not worth it without you.”

Hot Rod didn’t know what to say to that, and Deadlock didn’t make him say anything. He walked purposefully back over to the berth, and Hot Rod pulled him down on top of him, holding him close as they kissed for the last time.

Hot Rod would have been shocked by the urgency of Deadlock’s motions if he hadn’t been feeling the exact same way. He kissed Deadlock as though by kissing him well enough he could stop time in this instant, freeze the war in place so that they’d never have to say goodbye. In the silence of the parked shuttle, the only noises coming from their frames and the places their frames met, it felt for a moment like it could even work.

Deadlock was the one to break the kiss, pressing their foreheads together and then easing away from Hot Rod. “You could come with me,” Hot Rod said, on impulse, to his back.

Deadlock didn’t respond to that. He graced Hot Rod with one last soft smile before exiting the ship, leaving Hot Rod to silence.

* * *

Hot Rod made it to the Valkyrie in time. The Valkyrie intercepted the Worldsweeper before it got anywhere near Iterion, sending it fleeing from the system. Optimus let Hot Rod be part of the landing party that rescued the remainder of his squad from the tunnels the Iterion sentients lived in. The hug Ironhide gave him at seeing him alive and whole made all of it feel worth it, at least for that moment.

Deadlock’s shuttle was searched and impounded, and if Hot Rod hadn’t thought to tuck the familiar banged-up datapad into a compartment in his frame before he left, he was certain he would never have seen it again.

Hot Rod wasn’t one to keep mementos, and he certainly wasn’t going to _read_ it. But it felt like there was something significant in Deadlock’s leaving it behind. Besides, after all the nonsense with the Valkyrie, Hot Rod was itching for a little rebellion and holding on to Deadlock’s copy of Towards Peace seemed like a better idea than some flashy disobedience likely to get him court marshalled.

He opened it by mistake, one day, as he was packing up his things to transfer to yet another new base. He picked it up, looking not at the text of the book but at the annotation scrawled in the margin.

 _The Decepticons were never what Megatron said he wanted them to be._ Hot Rod’s own words.

Hot Rod traced the annotation with his fingertips, imagining Deadlock writing it. Maybe, he let himself think, if they ever did meet again, Deadlock wouldn’t kill him after all.


End file.
